Beep Beep Bye Bye. A Farewell to Hanoi

Today is the first full day of my cushy westerners tour, which has started in a very, very nice hotel. It might be because I've been slumming it for a while now, but I went to sleep last night feeling so spoiled and comfortable and woke up to the best breakfast I've had yet in Vietnam. This evening we are boarding the overnight train to Lao Cai,which is right on the Vietnam-China border, and then we will be transferring to Sapa in the northwest mountains. I've heard lots of great things about Sapa from other guests at the hostel, and after 5 weeks, I'm itching to get out of the city and see some green. Lonely Planet describes Sapa as being "perched on a steep slope (and) overlooking a plunging valley of cascading rice terraces with mountains towering above the town on all sides".Our visit will include a 7 hour trek and so I anticipate plenty opportunities to be quietly and elatedly in awe of my surroundings.

And so the travel proper begins! I have, on the whole, enjoyed being in Hanoi, and feel as though I've got to grips with the city, the people and what it's all about.I've found that my experiences here have been quite polarised and either brilliant, happy and exhilarating or tear-jerkingly  frustrating, and when you run out of patience it's time to change tact and get into a different situation.

This week in particular I've felt very frustrated. It's been my last week at the Pagoda and I've left with very mixed feelings. Saying good bye to the kids was pretty tough,although I think it will be harder to carry on for a little while and realise I'm missing them and wondering how they are. Before I left I bought some big teddies and a big monkey which I gave away on my last day and were met with excited little faces.I also gave my little Hung a toy car - probably too young for him, but toy shopping in Hanoi is hard, especially if you're white - which made my boy cry. Oops. I also spent a number of hours one afternoon cleaning the Kindergarten. Having reached the end of my patience with the level of cleanliness, I went to the local shop, practically bought out their cleaning supplies and set to work. The toys have all been disinfected, as have the chairs, tables etc, and the floor has been scrubbed and bleached, leaving the water worryingly opaque.I also bought medical supplies, which the nannies stole to my disappointment - but maybe she needed 200 plasters and 4 boxes of eye drops?

Because it has been my last week here, I've also taken the opportunity to binge on all the delicious and indulgent treats that Hanoi has to offer. I've breakfasted at the french bakery (which made me painfully miss the Oxford Maison Blanc and my girls), eaten amazing melting chocolate cake, a 14 flavour ice cream fondue (not by myself) - FYI green tea ice cream tastes like fish, but peanut ice cream (thanks for the heads up, Tom) is amazing! And we also had brownies and burritos at Hanoi's best Mexican, and so on. Today I'm going back to Paris for my last slab of pineapple cake and tea.

One particularly good night after I got lost AGAIN, Caro and I ended up in a Jazz bar, had steak for $3 and shared a bottle of rice wine, and in the merriment ended up kicking off the dancing. We enjoyed it, but were slightly taken aback when a Vietnamese woman came up to join up and started undressing...Eyes averted and topped-up glass in hand, it took a fair amount of concentration  not to be distracted by her very sparkly bra. This girl was prepared, if anything.


No Shlomit. I disagree. And now I know why.

The most meaningful and thought provoking aspect of my time in Hanoi has been spent learning about revolutions, colonialism and the treatment of political activists. In my second year at university I studied a paper on Jurisprudence which looked at the theory and philosophy underlying law and political concepts. I enjoyed the paper, but never has it felt so relevant and personally important than when I've been here. I've experienced this in two respects.

The first came about through visits to the Hoa Lo prison, used by the French against the revolutionaries, and then by the Vietnamese against the Americans (some funny propaganda, if you ever get a chance to visit) and the revolutionary museum. I find it really difficult to communicate and this probably isn't the most appropriate forum for my ill-formed thoughts - but experiencing these two museums made me think about and understand in a fuller sense the concepts of 'Liberty', of political expression and the brutality of such deprivations.

I think that being in an essentially Communist state has further heightened my awareness of this. There's no free press, no contentious new theater and also no controversy. On a visit to the Ho Chi Mihn Mausoleum complex this morning, our guide was discussing with us the rumour that the head of the party is actually Ho Chi Mihn's only son - unlikely, and described to us as a "fairy tale" but swiftly followed by the phrase "no criticism", which has been repeated more than once since. There's also no pervading sense of expectations - of rights or complaint. My visa drama hit a frustrating new low this week and ended up with me actually bribing a policeman from the immigration department to get me an exit-visa - money in envelope and all. This freaked me out and left me feeling quite unsettled - so much so that for a few days I took to telling everyone to make it seem more real, rather than semi-ignoring this unnerving thing that happened. The scary and unsettling thing about this was that I was completely at the mercy of his good graces. To hassle him too much (he took a really long time) was to risk him refusing to "help" me, but at the same time, I had one working day left in Hanoi, a Russian visa to get and needed him to get his act together. Because it was so underhand it was unpredictable and volatile and I longed for a bureaucratic process and for my ability to do or not do something to depend on the charity I'm working for knowing someone inside the department who may decide to help me. It's a shame I've already finished my degree, because Administrative Law and the concept of Natural Justice (different to Natural Law if you've heard me rant about that!) have taken on a different and more relevant meaning.

Living here, experiencing it and reading some of the history has been so fascinating and has sparked a fuller interest and awareness that I cannot begin to get down here. When I get back to London I'm rereading Raz and bribing Rupert with beer so that he can rehash it with me.Lucky boy.

To Russia, with Efficiency. Much better than Love.

My Russia visa took a sum total of 90 minutes to issue. Well, 90 minutes from when I stepped inside the embassy, finding it took quite a bit longer. In case you ever find yourself in this situation, the consular section is on the other La Thanh street (not the one the taxi driver thinks it is), is actually that big metal door in the wall down a dirt track and unless you're happy to wait for over 3  hours in the sun and relentless heat, it's worth emailing ahead (thanks mum!) and letting them know you're coming. When I finally arrived (after, yep, getting lost again - boring now) I phoned in and felt pretty happy but also super guilty as the chic Russian consulate lady escorted me past the 30+Vietnamese people who had evidently been waiting since before I woke up that morning.

Once inside, the application and paperwork was completed, but I could only pay with USD, not VND. I left the embassy - had a broken mime-based conversation with a motorbike taxi man trying to explain I needed to change dong for dollar. My motorbike man got pretty excited when we finally communicated, and handed me the world's most ineffective helmet.We drove off, me trying to decide whether it would be better to try and secure the helmet to my head, or whether this increased my chances of falling off and so should hold on tightly. I opted for the latter, seeing how no matter what I did, the helmet was going to do nothing more than roll off ahead of me, should we crash.Good-o. He took me to a jewelery store (a dodgy looking one) where I repeated my previously successful mime-skit about dollars and dong, knowing the man understood when he pulled out a silver carrier bag full of dollar bills. Huh. I already had a $50 note and felt nervous that the ones presented to me in exchange for my dong looked completely different. I checked the security strip which seemed legit, and with fingers tightly crossed (almost a permanent disposition in Vietnam) got back on the death-bike. Back at the Embassy I was informed that my original bench-mark bill was old issue and "unacceptable to the Russian Consulate" and so I then had to negotiate with the people in the queue I'd so unceremoniously jumped an hour earlier to help me exchange more dollars and dong. My word, am I bored of visas! It all came good and I left the Embassy with a Russian visa in time for lunch.

Luckily I only have to do this one more time and it will be in Hong Kong, which my fellow travelers keep informing me is amazing, and oh so civilised. My itinerary has changed a bit and I will not have time to visit Mongolia sadly, but I've traded it on for time in HK, more time in China and hopefully, if I can organise it, a trip to Tibet. This will also mean that I will be going from Beijing to Vladivostok and doing the Trans-Siberian, properly-so-called. 

For now though I plan on being ferried around Vietnam for the next two weeks, and not having to think about visas, getting run over by Hanoi motorbikes, or, well, anything important really.